by Diane Duane
The drive itself was a RoanTech, one of the ten or fifteen main manufacturers. Stardrive manufacturers too had begun to produce drives along broadly similar lines, partly so they could start dealing in replacement parts for one another's drives, and partly because it made sense — there were only so many ways you could put a gravity induction engine and a mass reactor together. Their diagnostic routines tended to look much the same these days for the same reasons as the control pads did. Enda leaned over Gabriel's shoulder, watching him examine the drive's controlling software, and then looked at Angela.
"By the way," Enda asked, "have you been suffering any irregularities in the way your instrumentation works?"
"Yes we have," Angela said. "Right after we got here, all our displays and readouts started to act up. I was wondering if it had something to do with the stardrive. When that went, the instrumentation kept misbehaving, but don't ask me why."
"Well, at least it wasn't just us," Gabriel said, "but I can't think what might be causing it." There was a noise from down the hallway through which they'd just come. Angela glanced in that direction. "Oh, here's my partner."
Down the central hallway was a door belonging to a lift that apparently serviced the lower level of the ship. The lift door opened, and he could hear footsteps in the hall. There was something odd about the rhythm. A second later, through the control room door, came the largest weren that Gabriel had ever seen in his life.
"Grawl, these are the people who answered our distress call," Angela said. "Gabriel, Enda, this is Grawl." Weren could be twice the height of a small human, and this one was. They also could be twice the breadth, and this one was. She was absolutely massive, with fur much more silver than was usual for weren. It had light striping that made Gabriel think of a pale gray tabby that one of his family's neighbors on Bluefall had owned. The neighbor's tabby, fierce as it had been on occasion, did not have ten-centimeter claws, three-centimeter tusks, or a very large gun slung on a baldric over its shoulder. This weren had all of these, and she looked at Gabriel and Enda with an expression of which Gabriel could make absolutely nothing.
Gabriel did not have much experience with the species. The marine contingent he had served with had not spent much time in the worlds where the weren had much of a presence. He knew enough about them to understand that politeness was much valued in their culture and likely to keep one's own head from being torn off in an excitable moment. "I greet you," he said, "and hope that we are not intruding."
The dark eyes looked at him. "Welcome enough you are," the weren said in a soft rumbling voice, "here where any visitor is likely enough to be welcome, were he half your size." Gabriel nodded noncommittally. He wasn't sure if she had complimented or insulted him. "Cousin," said Enda, "well met on the journey."
The weren swept an arm low before her body. "Respected, starlight shine on your road as well."
Enda smiled. "A long road — nearly as long as yours. Kurg is far away indeed."
"Distance," said the weren, "is an artifact of the mind."
Angela chuckled and said, "Grawl and I ran into each other in Alaundril about a year ago. We've been together since. She was traveling. ."
"I was outcast," Grawl corrected.
Gabriel looked at her with surprise. "I can't imagine who would have had the nerve to throw you out of anywhere."
She gave him a look that he hoped was a smile. "I was the daughter of warriors, the granddaughter of warriors," Grawl rumbled, "but I was a disgrace among my family." "In what manner?" Enda said.
Gabriel looked at Enda in shock, but Grawl lowered her head to Enda's level — a good way down — and said, softly, "I was the smallest of my kindred, the weakest, the poorest fighter, last-born, last in regard, but there was worse than that to come."
Gabriel looked up at her, easily two hundred kilograms of muscle and claws, and could do little but shake his head. She saw the movement and turned toward him. Hot breath blew about him with a peculiar cinnamony scent, ruffling his hair. "I am a poetess," Grawl whispered.
"Poetry is hardly an art scorned among the weren," Enda said. "What was your clan's objection with this?"
"There have been no artists of any note in my family for some generations," Grawl said. "My clan-sire felt that mine was an unsuitable calling for the daughter and granddaughter of warriors, and though the rest of the clan did not agree with him, heis our sire. When he said I had gotten the best of my brothers by skill and stealth and craft when I could not do so by force and fight, the other clan members dared not argue with him."
Then a sound came out of her the likes of which Gabriel had never heard. Weren laughter, the sound of a pot boiling, but a pot full of lava. "Get the best of them I did. None of them can wind words as I do. None of them could stand before me when I made satires upon them! I caused my eldest brother to go den-living from embarrassment, and my eldest sister to snatch her mate half bald, all by merely telling the truth about them in public, in meter, in the meeting-place of our people. Furious my family was, and they raged and shrieked in housemoot! They sought to tear me with their claws, but the claws of my words were sharper. They sought to blast me with their flintlocks, but the bullets of my scorn flew truer. Finally they gathered together outlawed me, and paid my way off planet." She smiled. The expression, even with those tusks, was surprisingly benign from such a massive creature. "Having received what I desired from them, I went out into the Old Night with a good heart and sought my hire in ships, doing security work. So we met, Angela and I, and we have done well together."
Gabriel glanced over at Angela during this. She had the expression of someone hearing a very familiar story.
'The meter is reminiscent of the sesheyan double-stave," Enda said, "though not as telegraphic." Grawl's eyes went wide. "You too are an artist!" she cried. "Always and far and wide the fraal are known for their sensitivity and craft."
And flattery, Gabriel thought, keeping his face straight. "About your stardrive. ." he said. Angela looked at him. "Don't tell me you know what's the matter with it already!" Gabriel laughed. "I wish. Does the drive have its own display panel?" "Yes," Angela said, "though I would think that it would display everything necessary up here." "So would I," Gabriel said, "but it doesn't. Can we go down and have a look at it?" "Certainly," Angela said. "Come on."
She led him down the hall and to the lift again, while behind them Enda and Grawl began to discuss poetry. "How long have you been out with this ship?" Gabriel asked Angela as the lift door slid open. "About a year and a half now," she replied. "I have a five year lease from the family. After that, if I can demonstrate a profit when I get back, I get another five years. Otherwise my little brother gets a turn." They stood in the lift, and it sank toward the hold level. "Have you been back home since?" Gabriel said. Angela shook her head. "Not a chance. I wanted to get the family out of my hair for a while. . find out what life without constant commitments hanging over your head looks like." She sighed as the lift door opened. "It's been refreshing. A little hectic, sometimes, but I wouldn't give it up. One way or the other I'm going to make the best of these five years, not get tied down, and roam around a good ways." Gabriel raised his eyebrows at that as she led him down a hallway that was twin to the one above them. "So how was Eldala?" he asked.
She stopped and stared at Gabriel in complete disbelief.
"Eldala," Gabriel said. "Did you get there, eventually?"
"Where did you hear about that?" she asked, more surprised than suspicious.
"We were in the Terivine system the other day. On Rivendale."
She looked at Gabriel uncomprehendingly. "So?"
"So were you, apparently. One of the locals mentioned you and where you were going."
"Well, yes, we were there, but—" Angela shook her head, started walking down the hall again. "I don't remember telling anyone about Eldala."
"Little guy named Rov something," Gabriel said. "He remembered that moderately well, and he rememberedyou well enough to wonder where y
ou were. They're worried about you."
Now, as Angela paused by a sliding door and touched a combination onto the face of it, she looked completely confused. "Why would they be worried?"
The door opened, and they went in.
"You're kidding, right?" Gabriel said, pausing to look around the room. "It's just a small town, that settlement. They gossip about everything there. You told someone you were coming back through, and then you never came back. They think you're lying dead in a ditch somewhere."
The room was small, square and empty. The sealed main drive array took up the entire back wall, and a black metal panel with sealed the main access panel. Faired into the black metal was a big square panel of glass with a keypad at the top of it. Gabriel reached up, typed in the access command, and the entire diagnostic and drive system management directory rosette fanned out across the glass panel.
Angela leaned against the nearby wall. "It's so strange. I don't remember mentioning where I was going to anybody on Rivendale, although," she added, "wewere partying a lot while we were there…" "Ah," Gabriel said as he studied the directory rosette. They got blitzed, told everybody where they were going, what they were going to do…
Gabriel was beginning to form some opinions about this girl, and they were not flattering. Rich, probably. Careless. Mouth like a ramscoop.
"Aha," he said, finding the spot he wanted on the rosette. Gabriel touched that petal, and it became the core of another "flower" of options, one of which was log play. He selected that one. His old friend Hal had been an e-suit engineer onFalada, and Hal's second rule — after the one about reading the dumb-ass documentation — was to read the dumber-ass logs as well. "If nothing else," Hal had said, "it makes you look like you know what you're doing, however spurious this impression may be." Gabriel began working his way through the stardrive's logs. It had a diagnostic program to help him with this. The program looked at the logs, then at what they should look like, and then it finally showed any major differences it found.
Gabriel quickly scanned through the last several starfalls and starrises, and then started to read them with more care while the program was doing the same for the entire log. To Angela he said, "When they told me about this place you were going. I got curious. I'd never heard of it before. What caused your interest in it?"
"Well, it was a blank in the gazetteer," Angela said. "There had been some kind of accident when the original survey came through. Said they were having mechanical trouble. Anyway, they reported the planet as too cold and went on to their next stop." "Too cold?"
"Bad ambient temperature," said Angela. "Eight C below zero, apparently." Gabriel nodded. That would have been reason enough to pass on when there were hopes of finding something better in the next system along. Eight was a very low ambient, if he remembered the planetary climatic information he'd been taught as a marine. It suggested that even summer highs might not be much better than twelve C, which was bad for crops, even those that had been genetically tailored for chilly conditions. There was little point in settling a planet that was both far away and where food could not be successfully grown. You wound up having to bring everything in, and if there was no other resource there to make the trip worthwhile, no stellar nation or company would bother investigating settlement any further.
He paused, looking at something the diagnostic program had flagged. "Let me look at that," he told the computer. "So you gave up on it?" Gabriel asked Angela.
She shrugged and said, "It wasn't what we had in mind. We got tired of being far away from everything.. starfall after starfall, never seeing anyone, watching the same old entertainment over and over on the ship's channels. ."
"You have Grawl to make poetry for you," Gabriel said with an absolutely straight face. Angela punched him in the shoulder, more fiercely than Gabriel had braced himself to withstand. He rocked and barely kept from falling over sideways. "Don't mock her," Angela said. "She's had a hard time."
"She looks like she's survived it," Gabriel said, touching the panel again to focus the diagnostic's attention on what he thought he had found.
Angela folded her arms and stared down at the toes of her boots. "Survival isn't joy," she said. Gabriel paused, glancing at her. "I wouldn't know a lot about what constitutes joy for a weren." Angela gave him a resigned look. "How clear can any of us be about what goes on in an alien's mind? Any more than any of them can be clear about whatwe're thinking? I just worry about her, that's all. I think she'd really rather be home on Kurg, getting involved in tribal politics and ripping out the occasional suitor's throat, but she's made the best she can out of her life." She scratched at a worn place on the decking. "It must have been awful," Angela said softly, "always being beaten up and sat on, having the food stolen out from under your nose and everything else worthwhile being taken away from you by the stronger ones, the faster ones. Grawl found another way."
Angela looked up again and said, "But is she happy?" A touch of familiarity there? Gabriel thought. "And you," he said, "you got beaten up and sat on as well?"
She gave him a look both indignant and amused. "Ah, an amateur thought-wrangler," she said. "For your information, I was one of two and bigger than my brother. As a matter of factI beathim up whenever he needed it, which was most of the time. Brothers are always getting out of hand. If you don't show them the error of their ways early on, they run around making messes forever after."
Gabriel smiled at that. "I'll take your word for it. Meanwhile, look at this." He pointed at the log display in the glass and at the diagnostic program's suggestion of what should be present there. "I'm no expert, but this might be the trouble. I know our drive has routines to keep this from happening. Yours is enough like ours to suggest this is the problem. I think the synch between the two atomic clocks that handle the drive has been failing. See." He pointed. "The logs show them having gotten progressively more out of synch over the past few weeks. This one in particular, the gravity induction apparatus, looks like its clock has been speeding up. Not by huge amounts, but enough for it to start interfering now. Has this started acting strangely over the last couple of starfalls?"
Angela nodded. "Just after we left Mantebron." Gabriel stared at the diagnostics showing in the panel. "All right. I'm going to try to reset it. You willing to have me do that?" "Yes. I don't see that it can do that much harm."
I hope you're right, Gabriel thought. He backed up through the diagnostic program again and went down the tree to where the clock routines were. Touching a spot labeled Synchrony, he was rewarded by a message that asked,Reset clocks to match?" Aha," he said. "That they have this particular routine makes it sound like this problem might come up more than infrequently." Gabriel looked sideways at her. "Have you missed a scheduled service, by any chance?"
"Uh. ." She looked embarrassed. "Possibly."
"This may be one of the things they do on those routine services," Gabriel said, and touched the fork of the choice-tree that said YES. DONE, it said a second later.
"All right," he said. "When we're off the ship, punch it and see what happens. We won't leave until we see you safely away. If you can't get out, you and Grawl come aboardSunshine with us, and we'll get you to Aegis so you can arrange a return-and-tow with somebody there."
"Seems fair enough," Angela said as she went out. Gabriel closed down the panel routines and went after her.
As they were walking back to the lift, Angela looked at him curiously. "Something leak in your pocket?" "Huh? Oh." Gabriel glanced down at the pocket where the luckstone had been. "No, just a burn. I got careless with some equipment."
"Must have been some equipment. I thought those things were burn-proof."
"So did I," Gabriel said, thinking morosely of that spot on the decking. "Another of life's little surprises." In the lift, Angela leaned against its wall, looking thoughtful. She glanced up at him then, and Gabriel thought, Oh, please, don't invite me to dinner; I just want to get out of here and get on with what we were doing.
"
Eldala," Angela said. "Are you interested in it?" Gabriel blinked. "Uh. . why?"
"You mentioned it first. Plainly it must have stuck in your mind when you heard about it."
"Well," Gabriel said, "yes." He shrugged. "It hardly matters, though. You've got the exploration contract."
"I'll sell it to you," Angela said.
Gabriel stared at her as the lift door opened.
"Why?"
"It's no good to me now," said Angela. "If you're right about the drive clocks, I'll be glad, but I'm not going anywhere again without having this drive serviced. That may take me a while. By then. ." She shrugged.
By then you may have found something more interesting to do with your money, Gabriel thought. Hmf. She looked at him as they walked back into the control room. "Are you interested?" Gabriel looked over at Enda, who was seated next to Grawl. Enda, looking from him to Angela to him again, gave Gabriel a look that said, Should I ask?
"Angela's interested in selling the exploration contract for Eldala," Gabriel said.
At this, Grawl screwed her face down into what looked like a frown. Enda looked more than usually thoughtful. "The price?"
"Is negotiable, believe me," Angela said. "I just don't feel prepared to carry on with that contract at this point."
"You were there, I take it?" said Enda.
Angela nodded and Enda continued, "Not for long, though. Is the world habitable for humans?" "Not without a lot of support, I think," Angela said. "Low ambient, supposedly," said Gabriel.
"We landed, looked around the place, picked up some mineral samples and things like that," Angela said. "Rocks, mostly. We ran assay on some soil samples for ore artifact but didn't find anything terribly useful."
"There was much snow," said Grawl. "Great white peaks that towered to the blue heavens. Snow bannered from them in the sun, and the winds blew the snow about—" "Wait a minute," Gabriel said. "How glaciated was this planet?"
